Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton , East Coker , The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding . Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire.

The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in East Coker, the "hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing," and the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification

Sunday, September 23, 2012

When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and a sense of creative tension. Rilke refers to this as "the repository of unlived things." You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate. You have not avoided the call of commitment; yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers of life's passionate sacramentality. No life is single. Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies. Often, it is not the fact of our choosing that is vital, but rather the way we hold that choice. In so far as we can, we should ensure that our chosen path is not a flight from complexity. If we opt for complacency, we exclude ourselves from the adventure of being human. Where all danger is neutralized, nothing can ever grow. To keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality. To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity. Life cannot be neatly compartmentalized. Once the psyche is engaged with such invitation and courage, it is no longer possible to practice tidy psychological housekeeping. To keep one's views and convictions permeable is to risk the intake of new possibility, which can lead to awkward change. Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behavior.

I think the word religion means gathering together all energy at all levels, physical, moral, spiritual, at all levels, gathering all this energy which will bring about a great attention. And from there move. To me that is the meaning of that word. The gathering of total energy to understand what thought cannot possibly capture. Thought is never new, never free, and therefore it's always conditioned, fragmentary, and so on. So religion is not a thing put together by Thought, or by fear, or by the pursuit of satisfaction and pleasure. But something totally beyond all this, which isn't romanticism, speculative belief, or sentimentality. And I think if we could keep to the meaning of that word, putting aside all the superstitious nonsense that is going on in the world in the name of religion.~ J. Krishnamurti

Thursday, September 13, 2012

In prayer, we come nearest to making a real clearance in the thicket of thought. Prayer takes thought to a place of stillness. Prayer slows the flow of the mind until we can begin to see with a new tranquility. In this kind of thought, we become conscious of our divine belonging. We begin to sense the serenity of this clearing. We learn that regardless of the fragmentation and turbulence in so many regions of our lives, there is a place in the soul where the voices and prodding of the world never reach. It is almost like the image of the tree. The branches can sway and quiver in the wind, the center of the tree, there pertains the stillness of its anchorage. In prayer, thought returns to its origin in the infinite. Attuned to its origin, thought reaches below its own netting. In this way prayer liberates thought from the small rooms where fear and need confine it. Despite all the negative talk about God, the Divine still remains the one space where thought can become free. There we will be liberated from the repetitive echoes of our own smallness and blindness... Prayer is the path to the secret belonging at the heart of our other lives.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

At the high-tide of night, when the first breath of dawn
came upon the wind, the Forerunner, he who calls himself echo to a voice yet
unheard, left his bed-chamber and ascended to the roof of his house. Long he stood and looked down upon the
slumbering city. Then he raised his
head, and even as if the sleepless spirits of all those asleep had gathered
around him, he opened his lips and spoke, and he said:

“My friends and my neighbors and you who daily pass my gate,
I would speak to you in your sleep, and in the valley of your dreams I would
walk naked and unrestrained; far
heedless are your waking hours and deaf are your sound-burdened ears.

“Long did I love you and overmuch.

“I love the one among you as though
he were all, and all as if you were one.
And in the spring of my heart I sang in your gardens, and in the summer
of my heart I watched at your threshing-floors.

“Yea, I loved you all, the giant
and the pygmy, the leper and the anointed, and him who gropes in the dark even
as him who dances his days upon the mountains.

“You, the strong, have I loved,
though the marks of your iron hoofs are yet upon my flesh; and you the weak,
though you have drained my faith and wasted my patience.

“You, the rich have I loved, while
bitter was your honey to my mouth; and you the poor, though you knew my
empty-handed shame.

“You the poet with the borrowed
lute and blind fingers, you have I loved in self indulgence; and you the
scholar, ever gathering rotted shrouds in potters’ fields.

“You the priest I have loved, who
sit in the silences of yesterday questioning the fate of my tomorrow; and you
the worshipers of gods the images of your own desires.

“You the thirsting woman whose cup
is ever full, I have loved you in understanding; and you the woman of restless
nights, you too I have loved in pity.

“You the talkative have I loved,
saying, ‘Life hath much to say’; and you the dumb have I loved, whispering to
myself, ‘Says he not in silence that which I fain would hear in words?’

“And you the judge and the critic,
I have loved also; yet when you have seen me crucified, you said, ‘He bleeds
rhythmically, and the pattern his blood makes upon his white skin is beautiful
to behold.’

“Yea, I have loved you all, the
young and the old, the trembling reed and the oak.

“But alas! It was the
over-abundance of my heart that turned you from me. You would drink love from a cup, but not from
a surging river. You would hear love’s
faint murmur, but when love shouts you would muffle your ears.

“And because I have loved you all
you have said, ‘Too soft and yielding is his heart, and too undiscerning is his
path. It is the love of a needy one, who
picks crumbs even as he sits at kingly feasts.
And it is the love of a weakling, for the strong loves only the strong.’

“And because I have loved you
overmuch you have said, ‘It is but the love of a blind man who knows not the
beauty of one nor the ugliness of another.
And it is the love of the tasteless who drinks vinegar even as wine. And
it is the love of the impertinent and the overweening, for what stranger could
be our mother and father and sister and brother?

“This you have said, and more. For often in the marketplace you pointed your
fingers at me and said mockingly, ‘There goes the ageless one, the man without
season, who at the moon hour plays games with our children and at eventide sits
with our elders and assumes wisdom and understanding.’

“And I said ‘I will love them
more. Aye, even more. I will hide my love with seeming to hate, and
disguise my tenderness as bitterness. I will wear an iron mask, and only when
armed and mailed shall I seek them.’

“Then I laid a heavy hand upon your
bruises, and like a tempest in the night I thundered in your ears.

“From the housetop I proclaimed you
hypocrites, Pharisees, tricksters, false and empty earth-bubbles.

“The short-sighted among you I
cursed for blind bats, and those too near the earth I likened to soulless
moles.

“The eloquent I pronounced
fork-tongued, the silent, stone-lipped, and the simple and artless I called the
dead never weary of death.

“The seekers after world knowledge I
condemned as offenders of the holy spirit and those who would naught but the
spirit I branded as hunters of shadows who cast their nets in flat waters and
catch but their own images.

“Thus with my lips have I denounced
you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names.

“It was love lashed by its own self
that spoke. It was pride half slain that
fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger
for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in
silence, prayed your forgiveness.

“But behold a miracle!

“It was my disguise that opened
your eyes, and my seeming to hate that woke your hearts.

“And now you love me.

“You love the swords that stride
you and the arrows that crave your breast.
For it comforts you to be wounded and only when you drink of your own
blood can you be intoxicated.

“Like moths that seek destruction
in the flame you gather daily in my garden: and with faces uplifted and eyes
enchanted you watch me tear the fabric of your days. And in whispers you say the one to the other,
‘He sees with the light of God. He
speaks like the prophets of old. He
unveils our souls and unlocks our hearts, and like the eagle that knows the way
of foxes he knows our ways.’

“Aye, in truth, I know your ways,
but only as an eagle knows the ways of his fledglings. And I fain would disclose my secret. Yet in my need for your nearness I feign
remoteness, and in fear of the ebb-tide of your love I guard the floodgates of
my love.”

After saying these things the
Forerunner covered his face with his hands and wept bitterly. For he know in his heart that love humiliated
in its nakedness is greater that love that seeks triumph in disguise; and he
was ashamed.

But suddenly he raised his head,
and like one waking from sleep he outstretched his arms and said, “Night is
over, and we children of the night must die when dawn comes leaping upon the
hills; and out of our ashes a mightier love shall rise. And it shall laugh in the sun, and it shall
be deathless.”

One is everlastingly comparing oneself with another, with what one is, with what one should be, with someone who is more fortunate. This comparison really kills. Comparison is degrading, it perverts one's outlook. And on comparison one is brought up. All our education is based on it and so is our culture. So there is everlasting struggle to be something other than what one is. The understanding of what one is uncovers creativeness, but comparison breeds competitiveness, ruthlessness, ambition, which we think brings about progress. Progress has only led so far to more ruthless wars and misery than the world has ever known. To bring up children without comparison is true education.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Sunday, September 2, 2012

I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, and so on. This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In it’s best-known, it’s most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important, and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning…

Harlan disliked handling money because of its abstractness and impersonality; for he did not enjoy either paying it or receiving it in payment. He felt a social embarrassment in monetary transactions that country people still feel, as if money is simply too crude a means of exchange between human beings.